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I think we can all agree that the Spartans are just kinda weird. Speaking of primary sources though, what's the consensus on the accuracy of Procopius' Secret History? Accurate description of a decadent palace, or the 6th century equivalent of Glenn Beck?
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Sep 23, 2012 15:08
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Grand Fromage posted:The generals later did spend significant amounts of time in the field, but it was still part of the political world. It wasn't the old system of consuls being the generals and swapping command days and that poo poo--they knew that didn't work--but leading an army was still a fundamentally political appointment for a long time and a way to make a career. There were some instances of a soldier rising up to be a general but most of them were aristocrats that did it as part of their expected duties. Eventually the obvious problem of having your politicians running around with armies gets somewhat taken care of by legally separating the political and military worlds. This is part of why medieval Rome doesn't have constant civil wars the way classical Rome did. By "medieval Rome" you mean the Byzantines? They had plenty of civil wars. Some of them were succession conficts for the throne, but a bunch were led by the army trying to overthrow the civilian political regime (e.g., the Doukas) because they kept making GBS threads up the themes system that kept the army funded.
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Sep 24, 2012 03:00
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Grand Fromage posted:Did they? I don't know much about that era but from what I've read it didn't seem like there was anywhere near the level of civil strife that classical Rome endured. Lots of infighting and assassinations but not so much giant armies roaming the countryside battling. But that's from a minimal amount of reading on the subject. Ah, OK. There wasn't any analogous period to the chaotic period Marius and Augustus, with huge armies led by politicians roaming the lands in their bid for power, but in the decades prior to Manzikert, the army tried to overthrow the emperor a few times, until the emperor essentially disbanded it and decided to rely on mercenaries. Then they had to hire the Turks to get rid of the mercenaries, the crusaders to get rid of the Turks, and so forth.
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Sep 24, 2012 03:45
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Grand Fromage posted:Can you write more about this? Like I said I'm mostly useless with this period and just as interested as other people reading might be. Sure. Basically, the underlying problem was the "theme" system that the medieval Romans used to support their armies. The peasant-soldiers were given an allotment of land, enough to feed a family and allow them to afford decent arms & armor, so long as they were able to provide a soldier when the empire needed one. This meant that the empire could call up a well-equipped semi-professional soldier who supported himself when they needed. The land-owning nobility hated this, of course, since having peasants "own" land limited the size of their estates. Legally, that land couldn't be sold, mortgaged, or otherwise encumbered. So whenever pro-nobility emperors were in power, the peasant-soldiers were pushed off their land, leading to military coups, and whenever pro-military emperors were in power, the estates of the landowners were reduced in size as land was given back to the soldiers, leading to palace coups, riots, and noble rebellions. The specific details are full of sex, betrayal, and more eye-gouging than you can shake a pointy stick at, but that's underlying reason for the domestic instability of the 800-1100 period. Well, that and the Arab/barbarian invasions. Things really started to break down during the reign of Constantine X (1059-1067), however. As head of the Doukas family, one of the wealthiest landowners in Anatolia, he undid all the reforms of his predecessor, which led to several military revolts by unpaid soldiers. After narrowly surviving one, he decided to essentially disband the army, and would rely on mercenaries and private armies financed by the nobility to fend off the raids by the Normans and Turks. This worked about as well as you'd imagine. When his successor, Romanos IV (1067-1069) came to power (by romancing Constantine X's widow), he found that the remnants of the army was literally armed with staves and pitchforks. He tried to rebuild and re-equip the army while also dealing with invasions by Robert the Weasel and Alp Arslan, which led to the fiasco at Manzikert, where the mercenaries refused to fight, the Doukas's private army deserted mid-battle, and Romanos IV was captured and forced to pay a huge ransom. But on his way back to Constantinople, Constantine X's brother, John Doukas, used his army to seize power, installed his nephew Michael VII as emperor, and had Romanos IV blinded and abandoned. He then tore up the treaty with the Turks. The mercenaries that had deserted at Manzikert set up a little kingdom in the middle of Anatolia. John Doukas tried to drive them out, but his mercenaries went over to the other side, and he was captured and the leader of the mercenaries set John up as a puppet claimant to the imperial throne. Michael VII then had to negotiate with the Turks (Alp Arslan had died by then), granting them swathes of eastern Anatolia and Armenia, and in return, they helped defeat the renegade mercenaries and "rescue" his uncle. Michael was eventually overthrown by Nicephorus II, who was then overthrown by Alexis Comnenus. Alexis had the brilliant idea of asking the pope to convince the major western European powers to drive the Turks out of Anatolia. The pope responded by calling for the crusades to drive the Arabs out of the Holy Land, not quite what Alexis had in mind, but hey. The deal was that the crusaders were supposed to return the captured land to the Byzantine empire, but they decided to set up their own independent kingdoms instead. This led to a hundred years of infighting, the "Great Schism" between Catholic and Orthodox, embarrassing defeats, and eventually the sack in 1204. The Greek Despots of Morea and Trebizond eventually figured out that in order to actually win wars and defend territory, they had to have their own armies, and managed to recapture Constantinople, a broken shell of what it used to be. They had to grant embarrassing trade concessions to the Venetians and the Genoese, but the empire was restored! Most of this comes from Norwich's history of Byzantium. It's a good read; the 800-1100 period is pretty entertaining reading, and is often left out of American history curriculums, since as Gibbon put it, "gently caress da Byzantines and their contributions to Western history".
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Sep 24, 2012 15:26
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When they lost their entire navy at Syracuse, they were kinda hosed. The ships could be replaced, it was the 20,000 veteran rowers that couldn't.
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Sep 25, 2012 01:45
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DarkCrawler posted:So did Western European nations recognize Eastern Roman Empire as a direct continuation of Rome? Did they still look admiringly at Roman achievements and success and want to emulate them? Or did the whole mess of migrations really just confuse the poo poo out of everyone and people didn't start going all "Yay Rome!" until the Renaissance hit? Nope! Remember, when the pope crowned Charlemagne in 800, he was crowned as the Emperor of the Romans in a deliberate "gently caress you" to the Eastern Roman empire.
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Sep 27, 2012 23:53
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Moist von Lipwig posted:Then why didn't they? Was later medieval Rome more of a conservative, isolationist state than the raging empire of earlier Rome? Yeah, Belisarius tried to reconquer the west in the 500s, and almost re-conquered Italy... and then it fell apart when he was pulled back to deal with a Persian invasion. He managed to salvage the southern part of Italy and Sicily, which remained in Byzantine hands until the Arabs conquered Sicily and Robert the Weasel canquered Bari. But the continuing Persian wars sapped most of the Byzantine's strength. Not until Heraclius destroyed the Persian armies in Mesopotamia was that threat ended... just in time to have most of the empire (Africa and the Levant) fall to the Arab conquest. Past 800 or so, the Byzantines can't really project their power ourside their borders, and starting about 900 or so they contract their navy out to the Venetians... which no doubt seemed like a good idea at the time.
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Sep 28, 2012 01:04
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Grand Fromage posted:Just to break down Constantinople's defenses. I think that's seriously understating the efforts of the Fourth Crusade. They seized control of the tower on the other side of the Golden Horn and lowered the chain so that the Venetian ships could sail right up to the landward walls in that section of the city. Then they stormed the city from several points, including from the ships. This was aided by infighting between the Byzantines (they went through three emperors during the siege and sack, one of whom slipped away with the contents of the treasury). The "undefended gate" story I believe comes from 1453. Even after the huge cannon, the ships moved across the golden horn, the Turks still needed an open gate to enter the city... of course the outcome was never in doubt, and they were busy assaulting the city from several directions, so the significance isn't quite as dramatic. sullat fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Oct 1, 2012 |
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Oct 1, 2012 14:56
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Beamed posted:You mentioned how the Goths and Vandals were essentially Romanized when they were ruling over the conquered parts of the empire, but why is it that we have so little written sources from them? Is that one of the aspects of Roman culture they just didn't adopt? The writings from the Roman/Greek era are mostly defined by what managed to survive 1500+ years of mistreatment. I can't imagine that the Byzantine mooks would have been too interested in copying heretical "barbarian" works of literature after they defeated the Vandals.
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Oct 4, 2012 17:04
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Now that Libya & maybe Algeria are opening up, maybe there will be another Nag Hammadi type of find in the desert. Best place for preserving scrolls. I seem to recall reading that there are tons of untranslted clay tablets in Iraq, too. Wonder how many more paradigm-shattering revelations are in there, hidden amongst the payroll stubs and ancient 1040s?
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Oct 5, 2012 16:21
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Grand Fromage posted:I didn't know about Pythagoreanism, interesting. Same justification for it as Buddhism too, with the belief in soul reincarnation. Pythagoras may have been a vegetarian, but he supposedly sacrificed 100 bulls to the gods in honor of his discovery of irrational numbers.
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Oct 15, 2012 05:20
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QCIC posted:Except that in the republican era, canvassing was done to appeal to clientes who would in turn compel their patrons to vote in whichever way. There was no pretense of direct representation until the principate, and that illusion fell away pretty quickly after the first few pleasure domes. Cicero's little book on how to win elections is delightfully cynical and probably still applicable to modern politics, no matter how crazy the Roman election system seems in comparison to the entirely logical and rational and pure American System. 
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Oct 27, 2012 06:03
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"Cincinnatus was fake." "Pythagoras never existed." You guys are bumming me out. Next you're going to tell me that Corolianus never got spanked by his mother or that Mark Anthony was a figment of Octavian's imagination.
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Oct 28, 2012 06:03
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Grand Fromage posted:It was rote learning. Very similar to what they do over here in Asia, memorize and repeat. From my own experience working in a school that operates that way, I would say yes, education was bad. Many who could afford it hired private (usually Greek) tutors to get something better than the standard schooling. Marcus Aurelius wrote a lot about how lovely Roman schooling could be and how lucky he felt to have had private education. Studying for the test? That sounds very familiar in the Western world... But "rote learning" seems fairly typical for your basic education needs throughout history. I was reading about the Sumerians a while back... and their schools were based on rote learning and bribing the teachers.
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Oct 29, 2012 05:11
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Grand Prize Winner posted:What are the three greatest Roman myths? Do you mean modern myths about the Romans, or Roman myths they would have told over the hearth fires?
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Oct 29, 2012 11:34
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Xguard86 posted:Cicero was executed and had his writing hand nailed to a door. The grachi were killed for their land reform. It was an accepted tactic to have your supporters physically remove or beat your opponents during election debates. Then there's the fact that over 99 percent of the people in Rome and the empire has no voice at all except for occasionally forming a mob around a top guy. Plus slavery. Well, what happened to politicians wasn't necessarily from their speaking, it was from their political actions as well. Cicero snubbed Anthony in the Senate, the Gracchi were promoting land reform (by taking it away from the large estate owners), Biblius was opposing Caesar. I guess the question is whether the man on the street would have faced trouble for speaking his mind. In the first 400 years of the republic, who knows? Only in the last hundred years when we read about the Gracchi being murdered with 300 of their supporters, or Marius, Sulla and Octavian's reported massacres of their opponent's followers do we start seing people killed solely on the basis of their political associations. But then, "not being murdered for speaking your mind" is a pretty low bar to determine a "golden age" of free speech. Citing an impeccable, unimpeachable source, there was the episode of Rome where Caesar's right hand slave has some guy who is bad-mouthing Caesar assassinated.
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Oct 30, 2012 04:33
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DarkCrawler posted:Cutest nickname for a horrible tyrant ever. The later Roman emperors had some good ones: Constantine "the poo poo name" and Michael "the Forger". Dunno if they were called that to their faces or just by their opponents, though.
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Oct 30, 2012 18:07
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WoodrowSkillson posted:I think it would have seriously slowed Rome's growth though as a formidable phalanx based army would have handed them some defeats instead of the near effortless wars that occurred. It is amazing that the Selucids got toppled so easily. An empire that stretched from Turkey to Iran to Israel and they got beat in a matter of years. Sounds like another empire that got beat in a matter of years... empires built by one ethnic ruling class over a large territory of other groups often fall quickly if they lack native support.
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Nov 3, 2012 21:58
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Mixoux posted:Speaking of which, how did medieval Roman military evolve after the west fell? Specifically during the Komnenian period, since it seems like after that they started relying quite a bit on mercenaries. I'm assuming they still had one of the most disciplined professional armies in Europe during this time, but I never could find much information on what exactly the makeup of their army was like or the tactics they used were, aside from cavalry playing a larger role. Basically, they switched to the "theme" system starting in 500 or so. The specifics varied over time, but essentially, peasant-soldiers were give allotments of land in military districts (called themes). The allotments were big enough to support a family and allow the soldier to afford arms and armor. But the system had largely broken down by the Kommenei period. Loss of territory played a big role, but greedy nobles played a bigger one. They hated the system because ther were all these stupid peasants owning land that could be used to enrich the nobility instead! What a waste! So the Doukas emperors abolished the system before (and again, after) Manzikert. Prefering to rely on mercenaries. This didn't work out quite so well, they had to hire the Turks to get rid of the mercenaries, the crusaders to get rid of the Turks... eventually they got rid of the crusaders with their own troops from Trebizon and Morea, but by then the Turks had decided to stay. As far as the organization of the military, it varied from period to period. When the theme system was working, you had well-equipped veteran infantry backed by mercenary cavalry from loyal client states, and when it wasn't working, you had peasants with pitchforks backed by unreliable mercenaries. For a while, the Varangian Guard was used as heavy infantry, but after the disasters at Manzikert and Durazzo they were reduced to ceremonial bodyguards.
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Nov 4, 2012 19:41
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Josef bugman posted:I know this is not specifically "roman" history, but what do the romans have to say about Norway, sweden and denmark? Do they have any tales of gigantic monsters or is there just nothing written at all? A bunch of the Roman military commanders were obsessed with conquering Persia so they could consider themselves equal with Alexander the Great: Crassus, Mark Anthony, Trajan, Julian, Valerian. Obviously Alexander's success was the exception rather than the rule, but all the cool* emperors thought that they could replicate his success. *And a bunch of others. sullat fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Nov 8, 2012 |
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Nov 8, 2012 20:34
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cheerfullydrab posted:Here's a fun trivia question I was reminded of by the poster who was asking about Scandinavia. Who can guess what traveled along the route in red? I'd guess slaves. Although really, they came from everywhere. But the Slav trad was pretty big.
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Nov 9, 2012 01:23
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Grand Fromage posted:Some day I do kind of want to write a wuxia novel about a Roman soldier who went to China as security for an embassy and was the only survivor of an ambush, then makes a life in China and eventually hunts down and kills the Chinese general who was responsible for the ambush. I need to read a whole lot more about Han dynasty China first. There is the legend of the Roman legionnaires captured at Carrahae and sold as slaves or as mercenaries who ended up in Western China. Just a legend, of course, backed up by on;y a few slivers (probably misinterpreted) of evidence, but it makes for a good story. Another legend is that Byzantine monks stole the secret of silk-making from China and brought it back to Constantinople. Once again, it may be apocraphyl, but sericulture did begin in the Mediterranean about that time, so there may be a grain of truth.
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Nov 10, 2012 17:01
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Fornadan posted:There's quite good archaeological evidence of Scandinavians having returned home after serving in the legions though Vsrangian Guard, for sure. But I was not aware of any evidence of Scandinavians serving during the early Imperial period.
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Nov 12, 2012 18:06
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Grand Fromage posted:The eerie feeling about the Bronze Age Collapse isn't just you guys. I vaguely resemble professionals in some ways (though not really) and eerie or unsettling is how I feel about it. All these truly great civilizations, thousands of years of development, and it's just... gone. In a very, very short time. With no real record of what happened. And then there's this almost post-apocalyptic period of Mediterranean history for centuries after. Huh, I always thought the Bronze Age collapse was pretty straight-forward. Invaders overrun the Myceneans in Greece, then the Linear B civilization in Crete collapses, then the "Sea Peoples" attack Egypt, ending up with the Philistenes showing up in the Levant and beating up the Hitites and the Hebrews. Looks like a fairly standard barbarian invasion with one group knocking the next into attacking their neighbors like a chain-reaction. Comstar posted:Didn't literacy disappeared from mainland Greece for several centuries? Whatever happened it took reading and writing with it - presumably everyone who knew how died out and things were so bad no one really noticed. Yeah, the "Linear B" writing system was used in Greece and Crete prior to the collapse, and then it disapperas for a while, before being replaced by the Phoenician alphabet in 900-800 BC. sullat fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Nov 13, 2012 |
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Nov 13, 2012 16:38
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Tao Jones posted:The short answer is no, not really. We have some ancient authors' views of them (Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans, some letters by Alciphron, bits here and there by Plutarch, etc.), but we have nothing that a hetaira herself wrote. Probably the closest thing to a glimpse of what citizens might have thought about a hetaira is a speech by Demosthenes, Against Neaera, which is a speech given by a prosecutor. (Naturally, ancient court proceedings weren't necessarily about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but it's an example of an argument crafted to convince a jury - so likely a lot of details in it are meant to play on the prejudices and beliefs of the average Athenian.) There was an anecdote about a hetaira that was being tried in Athens for blasphemy; the defense attorney had her strip down in court with the argument that someone so good lookin' was so favored by the gods that they couldn't possibly be guilty.
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Nov 14, 2012 02:05
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the JJ posted:They bounced around in the Persian Empire before Alexander. Athenian fleets supporting Egyptian revolts against the King was one of the ways the Delian League kept itself occupied. Egypt wasn't doing so hot even before that. The Nubians conquered it c. 760, and then the Assyrians came in and did their thing (pyramids of skulls, graphic tortures, cities erased). The Egyptians briefly gained independence after that, but then Cambyses conquered Egypt in 525 or so. Of course, they never accepted it easily, Xerxes, for example, had to delay his Greek expedition for severa; years because of a massive rebellion in Egypt. Of course, there was quasi-independence under the Ptolmeys, even though it was ruled by an inbred Macedonian elite, they adopted Egyptian rituals and religion to cement their rule over the peasants.
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Nov 14, 2012 13:10
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Big Willy Style posted:A quick glance tells me that lots of this migration happened because of climate change. So how did climate change effect the make up of the people and nations of the mediterranean? The climate change has a bigger effect on the peoples of the steppes and the northern forests. It gets colder, the grazing season gets shorter, so they move south, "displacing" whoever was already there. Those people then move south, "displacing" some other peoples, and so forth.
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Nov 14, 2012 19:46
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Besesoth posted:It's worth noting, too, that Athenian democracy was considerably more liberal than the Roman Republic; in Athens, any citizen (including, as noted, the hetairai) could participate, where in Rome it was largely limited to the landowning citizens. Athens also had the tradition of ostracism - named after ostrakoi, the potsherds on which votes were cast - which allowed the populace to force one of their own into exile for a certain number of years. This was done by writing the name of the person you wanted to exile on a potsherd and casting it into the pile. The potsherds were counted, and if the person who got the most votes also exceeded a certain threshold, they were exiled - I believe for 10 years. That's a very interesting view of Athenian democracy, since as far as I know from my readings, it was limited to wealthy male citizens at first, with the ability to participate being gradually extended to less wealthy males (under Solon), until finally male citizens would be compensated for participating (under Pericles), meaning they could take time off work to do some voting. But I've never heard any suggestion that women were allowed to participate, much less "resident aliens" and slaves, who comprised at least 2/3rds of the population. Rome also allowed all male citizens to vote, (at least after the creation of the tribunes) even if the tribes were gerry-mandered to hell. sullat fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 05:31
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cheerfullydrab posted:Is there any good fiction set during the Peloponnesian War? There's a Tom Holt novel set during that period, "The Walled Orchard", could check it out. Playwright gets sent on the Sicilian Expedition.
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Nov 17, 2012 01:43
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Eggplant Wizard posted:It's related to fennel and they ate it to death, I think. I didn't know it was also an abortifacient but I doubt that's the sole reason it was harvested to extinction. Isn't that the plant with the heart-shaped seeds? It was so popular as a symbol of loving that the shape of the seeds has been used as a symbol for love ever since. (Supposedly).
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Nov 18, 2012 19:41
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Halloween Jack posted:If the same happened to me, I would have to say that they never actually got the military under the control of the civilian leadership. The Air Force rebelling because General Welsh doesn't like Obama is not something we would ever think about happening. I'd like to hear what the resident experts think of this. I don't think that "civilian" leadership was even a concept that occured to them until, like, the Doukas emperors. Especially under an imperial system.
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Nov 27, 2012 16:33
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Grand Fromage posted:How's that for frightening, you're sitting in Tyre watching the Macedonian army slowly building that strip of land, every day getting closer and closer. I imagine it was similar to watching the ramp at Masada go up. You are so hosed. Yeah, the Romans were big on that kind of massive siege engineering. They did something similar at Iotapata too, although its not as iconic of a siege as Masada.
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Nov 29, 2012 03:38
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SlothfulCobra posted:Speaking of the Hittites, how much non-biblical evidence is there for the nation of Israel? According to their own book, they were a force to be reckoned with in the ancient world, but I never read about them in relation to other known civilizations. Basically they were there, when they weren't fighting their neighbors they were fighting each other. After a civil war, the northern kingdom, "Israel" was "absorbed" by the Assyrians, while the southern kingdom, "Judah" managed to stay nominally independent until the Babylonians came along in c. 600 BC. After the Persian conquest they were allowed to return and set up a Jewish client state, which eventually revolted from the Selucids in 140 BC or so (Hannukah!). That kingdom lasted until it was formally absorbed by the Romans a decade or so after Herod's death. If you want a non-biblical source, Josephus is one of the main ones, although obviously his accuracy leaves something to be desired. quote:Also, how big would cities be in the Bronze Age? Not necessarily just population wise, but how sprawling would they be too. Is something like this ridiculously oversized? The Sumerian cities (Ur, Uruk, Lagash) were probably the largest cities of the early Bronze age, and they are believed to have reached 40-50 thousand people during the height of the pre-Sargonic era (2300 BC).
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Dec 1, 2012 01:31
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Jazerus posted:Well, Caesar was the Queen, so it was the only thing to do. Well, the Selucids and the Ptolemic empires were in sorry shape by the time Rome turned up. The Ptolemic dynasty seemed to have a thing for nasty brother/husband v. sister/wife civil wars, and the Selucid kingdom had just been beaten by Persia and those aforementioned Jews.
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Dec 1, 2012 17:31
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Mitthrawnuruodo posted:This one's a little out of the way of the thread thus far, but the 7th century's still Ancient, right? I'm wondering if anyone can talk about the spread of Islam. Reading Wikipedia, it seems the Islamic caliphate had spread all the way from Mecca to the Iberian peninsula within 50 years of Muhammad's earliest reported revelations. Could someone throw some interesting light on how this came to be? There's a thread started by a guy about that specific topic, but basically, timing is everything. The united Arab tribes needed somewhere to expand, and the Roman empire and Sassanid Persia had just finished fighting a brutal war, Rome was exhausted and Persia had collapsed. Persia barely put up a fight and Rome managed to scrape up an army by the most extreme exertion... and then it was wiped out in a decisive battle in Syria. Without any major power to stop them, they just keep expanding... Until Tours (739), Talas (759), where they reached the limit of their expansion. Then they get "invited" to help sort out a civil war in Spain, and they end up staying there for ~600 years... timing was everything. Of course, it wasn't all so cut and dried, they had Berber revolts, Shiite revolts, Ethiopian invasions to deal with. And the Ummayad tax policy is usually cited as the reason why Islam was able to spread so quickly; but it also contained the seeds of their demise.
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Dec 3, 2012 16:34
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Comstar posted:Going down the rabbit hole...what as the Ummayad tax policy, and why did it help and also bring about the end? Muslims pay the lowest rate. Non-Muslims pay a much higher rate. The cost-conscious monotheist switches to Islam in a generation or two. So tax revenues plummet. They change the policy so that Arab Muslims pay the lowest rate, Non-Muslims pay the highest rate, and converts (and their kids) pay a rate somewhere in the middle... riots break out at the unfairness of it all, the Umayyid dynasty is unable to control the empire and the Abbasids take over. The first few Abbasids were less dependent on the Arab power-base, and so were able to establish a longer-lasting empire (although the edges started breaking away fairly quickly).
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Dec 3, 2012 19:50
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lil sartre posted:Tangentially related to this, does anyone know more about Ethiopian incursions in Arabia? I know that at various points they controlled large parts of the Arabian peninsula and I remember reading some years ago a legend about an Arab army that galloped into the sea and drowned because they were too scared to face the invading Ethiopians, but dunno much more on the subject. The Christian Ethiopians invaded and overthrew the Jewish king of Yemen c. 550 AD or so. He is said to have perished by galloping his horse into the sea. After that, they attacked the pagan Meccans (because they pooped in the Ethiopian's big church), but the desert trip was too muchfor the Ethiopian 's elephants, so they turned back. Supposedly that was the year Mohammed was born. Later c.800 or so, they invaded the Arab coastline again, but were soundly beaten and the Arabs counter-invaded pushed them back into the mountanious highlands.
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Dec 4, 2012 12:57
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DarkCrawler posted:It gets pretty ridiculous sometimes. Battle of Manzikert, Byzantine army is hosed, no hope in sight, then this guy rolls around and buys the Empire another couple centuries. I mean that's simplified version of events of course, but still... The Byzantines had roller-coaster ride of good emperors and bad emperors, that's for sure. Of course, Komnenos triggered the Crusades, which came back and bit the Byzantines in the rear end a mere century later, but that's someone else's problem.
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Dec 4, 2012 17:50
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Sylphid posted:This is very informative, thanks. I often consider it an amazing feat that direct Roman government lasted for about 2200 years, but then you read stuff about Roman technology, discipline, society, engineering, military, government, etc. and you realize how much of that success was deserved. No, the Gauls and non-Roman Italians were pretty cool with him and even joined his army in droves.
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Dec 4, 2012 22:35
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah, that's why there aren't records. It wasn't important until well after the fact. Also, the records would have been in Jerusalem, which is a bad place for them to be in that time frame.
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Dec 5, 2012 02:46
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